The Land of 1,000 Voices

By Lev Grossman

When Rob Malda founded Slashdot slashdot.org) all he wanted was a place on the Internet where he and his friends in Holland, Mich., could talk about stuff they liked: computers, the Linux programming language, science fiction--geek stuff. "There weren't any websites doing the subject matter I wanted," says Malda, who lives in Holland, and goes by the nom-de-nerd Commander Taco. "It all just kinda grew out of that very, very informally." By the time Slashdot was officially launched in 1997, the Net was hot, and geek culture was hip. Now, hyped only by word of mouth--no in-your face TV spots and no three-story billboards--Slashdot has a membership in the hundreds of thousands and logs well in excess of a million hits a day.

Malda has taken the idea of what news was, hacked it open and rebuilt it for the Internet age. Slashdot's secret weapon is the collaborative power of the Web. Malda and the other editors don't write the site's stories. Instead it is Slashdot's readers who send in the news. In effect, Malda has an army of reporters working for him, and as a result, Slashdot often scoops the mainstream media. Case in point: when Netscape decided to give away the source code of its browser, one of the biggest tech stories of 1998, Slashdot was first on the scene.

Malda posts stories that interest him on Slashdot's front page. Below each is a bulletin board-style forum where readers can jump in with their own thoughts. It's like the McLaughlin Group meets the AV club, 24 hours a day. "We're just like, here you go, talk, go crazy, and people do," says Malda. "In the best cases, you have people who will go to the source, add to it, extend it, throw in their own two bits." Those two bits add up: on average, the news stories on Slashdot get as many as 5,000 comments a day.

Right now Slashdot is still mainly for the digerati. The fare is a little more technical than your average nonhacker can handle. But the possibilities of Slashdot's collaborative-news model go way beyond the nerd world. One day the Internet may offer Slashdot-style sites for every niche kind of news. Want to try it? Malda gives away the software that runs Slashdot. Goodbye, Peter Jennings. Hail, Commander Taco.

--By Lev Grossman